Dear Dr. Jackie Sieppert and Dr. Ellen Perrault,

We are Clinical Specialization MSW students, and we are saddened to hear that the Family Therapy II elective will not be offered for the next Winter term. We are writing to you to share our student perspectives on the value of this elective.

Family Therapy II with Dr. Dan Wulff is a very valuable course. The post-modern approaches to family therapy presented by Dr. Wulff are very applicable to all areas of clinical social work practice. The course provided me with an incredible opportunity to explore, reflect on, integrate, and discuss various practice methods that, even though they were developed to be applied with Families, are equally applicable to working with groups, with organizations, with couples, and individuals.

The relational approaches to family work, as taught in Family Therapy II, truly represent the values and ethics of Social Work, in their focus on person-in-environment, in their detailed commitment to looking at and deconstructing dominant discourses, and in their commitment to enacting social justice in all practice settings.

Unlike other helping disciplines, Social Work has the capacity and the ethical mandate to respond to social issues on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Family Therapy II is so much more than “working with families”: postmodern approaches to family therapy provide a lens through which social workers can see people living and suffering and dealing with their lives in larger contexts, AND, equally importantly, family therapy gives social workers both the theoretical and practical tools to promote change from the bottom up by empowering people to value and honour their lives and struggles.

Further, Dr. Dan Wulff is a highly experienced and skilled family therapist, which makes him an excellent guide and facilitator for these opportunities. New MSW students will truly miss an amazing training opportunity if this elective is not available. This will be a significant loss to new social workers getting ready to serve as clinical practitioners.

We hope you reconsider the decision to cut this option from electives available to future MSW Social Work Students. Our profession needs these opportunities to truly embody anti-oppressive social work practices.